5.  The applicant was born in 1973 and lives in Bucharest.
6.  The case concerns the criminal investigations against the applicant, a police officer; two other police officers, I.U. and R.B; and two business people, H.S. and S.B. The applicant was suspected of having facilitated contact between the other two police officers and H.S., who acted on behalf of S.B., in order for the two police officers to convince a prosecutor to revoke, in exchange for a significant bribe, an international arrest warrant issued in the name of S.B. in the context of a different criminal investigation concerning financial crimes.
7.  On 18 June 2002, the applicant was summoned to the office of the Military Prosecutor attached to the Supreme Court of Justice for questioning. He was informed that he was suspected of conspiracy to commit bribery and on the same date he was placed in pre-trial detention.
8.  On 11 July 2002 an indictment was issued and on 12 July 2002 the file was transferred to the Bucharest Military Tribunal. The evidence submitted by the prosecutor included transcripts of recordings of telephone conversations between the accused, some of which were in Romanian and some in Hebrew.
9.  The applicant’s pre-trial detention was regularly extended by the competent courts and his requests to be released on bail were all dismissed.
10.  On 4 December 2002, the military court ruled that it did not have jurisdiction to examine the case. On 7 January 2003, the Supreme Court of Justice established that the Bucharest Court of Appeal was the competent court to hear the case.
11.  By an interlocutory judgment of 12 March 2003, the Bucharest Court of Appeal ordered a technical expert examination of the audio tapes submitted to the file by the prosecutor. In a hearing held on 19 March 2003, all the accused denied that the voices on the audio tapes were theirs and disputed the authenticity of the tapes. In the interlocutory judgment issued on that date, the Court of Appeal stated the following:
“In respect of the [prosecutor’s] request to review the decision to adduce as evidence a technical expert examination of the audio tapes, the court considers that it is ill-founded, given that the basis for the indictment as well as the main evidence against the accused are precisely these audio recordings and their transcriptions and that the accused denied that the voices on the tapes were theirs or that those discussions took place; therefore it is necessary to draw up an expert report on the recordings.”
12.  The hearings were postponed several times, among other reasons because the technical expert report was not ready. The expert report had to be drawn up by the National Institute for Forensic Expertise (“the INEC”), an institution governed by the Ministry of Justice.
13.  In a hearing on 13 October 2003, the Court of Appeal took note of the fact that the accused had requested that the audio tapes be played in court in order to establish and verify whether the transcripts from the case file corresponded with the recordings, whether the recordings had been made in line with the legal requirements, and whether some excerpts had been taken out of context. The domestic court further considered that given the fact that it had ordered a technical expert report on the tapes, the tapes could not be played in court until they had been analysed.
14.  In a hearing on 24 November 2003, the parties discussed a letter sent by the INEC in which it stated that it did not have experts qualified to carry out voice identification. The accused insisted that a new date be set for the hearing once an expert report had been included in the materials of the file.
15.  In a hearing on 15 December 2003, the parties were informed that the technical report was not ready. The lawyer representing S.B. insisted that if the transcripts were to remain in the case file, it was essential to have the report. The applicant’s lawyer stated that the accused contested the evidence itself, as the requirements of the Code of Criminal Procedure had not been respected, and that it should be completely removed from the case file. The lawyer representing R.B. stated that the tapes could not be heard by the court until they had been analysed in order to verify their authenticity. In a last address to the court, the applicant stated that he had not been presented with the transcripts of the tapes and was not aware of their content.
16.  On 22 December 2003, the Court of Appeal concluded that, given the letter from the INEC and the conditions under which the tapes had to be analysed, the time it would take and the position of the accused, it was impossible to prepare the report. Considering also that the expert report was superfluous since there was already enough evidence in the file, the court revised its decision to adduce this evidence.
17.  The final hearing was held on 12 January 2004. The prosecutor declared that the applicant’s guilt had been proved by the statements of the co-accused and by the recordings of the applicant’s phone conversations, the transcripts of which were available in the investigation file. The applicant was charged with having put H.S. in contact with two of his fellow officers, who were closer to the husband of the prosecutor who was to be bribed, in the knowledge that the purpose of the introduction was to bribe the prosecutor to revoke the arrest warrant in the name of S.B. The co‑accused changed their statements during the judicial proceedings, stating that the applicant had not been aware of the reason why H.S. had wanted to get in touch with the prosecutor and that he had never attended the meetings at which they had discussed the matter. The prosecution held that they were aware that the statements had been changed and considered the new statements to be insincere.
18.  In his final submissions before the first-instance court, the applicant asked to be acquitted on the ground that he had not committed any offence. He insisted that he had never taken part in any discussion between S.H. and the prosecutor’s husband.
19.  From the information submitted by the applicant, it appears that on 21 January 2004 the INEC submitted its report, which concluded that the audio tapes were not original. It stated that in the absence of any additional information, the tapes could be copies, mixings done with or without the intent to present a false reality, or fabricated. It also stated that voice identification could only be carried out on original recordings using the same equipment as that used for the recording.
20.  By a first-instance judgment of the Bucharest Court of Appeal of 26 January 2004, the applicant was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for conspiracy to commit bribery. After presenting at length the prosecutor’s submissions, the court proceeded with its own reasoning. It presented the facts, as established by the evidence in the file, and then stated:
“Even if all the other evidence adduced can be considered subjective to some degree, the transcripts of the phone conversations between the accused do not leave room for much doubt as to their activity, their behaviour, the way in which they intended to solve the problem, their attitude towards the State institutions, as well as their opinions concerning certain colleagues (police officers), prosecutors, judges, representatives of the Secret Services and even leaders of the Romanian State.
...
As has been mentioned above, the telephone conversations between the accused, which were recorded over several months, show clearly and without any doubt that the accused committed with intent the crimes with which they have been charged and accepted the risks deriving from them. During the criminal trial, in an attempt to defend themselves, they argued that the recordings had been unlawfully obtained, that the transcripts did not conform to the recordings, that in parts the voices were not theirs, and that excerpts of the transcripts had been taken out of context and had not been extensively presented, all of which led to the request to hear the tapes in the presence of a Hebrew-speaking assistant witness, and later to the request for a technical evaluation to be carried out. (...) At the same time, it should be noted that the only institution which had a legal obligation to carry out the technical evaluation of the recordings did not comply with that obligation and with the order of the court, rendering it impossible to adduce this piece of evidence.”
21.  The applicant and all the other accused lodged an appeal on points of law. The applicant asked for the quashing of the first-instance judgment on several grounds: that the courts examining the case had lacked jurisdiction and the composition of the courts had been unlawful; that his arguments concerning the evidence adduced in the case had not been addressed; that the constitutive elements of the crime for which he was convicted had been lacking; and that the decision was contrary to the law.
22.  By a final decision of 14 May 2004, the High Court of Cassation and Justice dismissed the appeal on points of law. It confirmed the facts established by the first-instance court and concluded that the latter had duly analysed all the evidence before it and correctly defined the crimes and the sentence. The final decision did not include any statement in respect of the lawfulness or admissibility of the tapes and their transcripts.